Alvin Brooks and Kansas City:
A love story imperiled by racism,
saved by service
February 21, 2021 | The Kansas City Star | Mar?
Rose Williams
Editor’s note: During the month
of February, in honor of Black History Month and the vibrant Black community
in Kansas City, The Star will feature profiles of Black Kansas Citians
by telling their stories and highlighting their businesses, causes, and
passions
Had it not been for goat’s milk, moonshine, a Winchester
44 rifle and some High John the Conqueror root, Alvin Brooks might never
have come to Kansas City.
In the years since he arrived as an infant with
a Black couple he thought were his biological parents, Brooks, 88, has
become one of Kansas City’s most beloved and well-known civic leaders —
Black, white or otherwise.
“That man loves Kansas City,” said Carrie Brooks-Brown,
the second of his five daughters. ”He thinks it is the greatest city in
the world.” When it comes to his greatest loves, she said, “It’s God, family
and Kansas City. That’s the order he puts them in.”
When it comes to his legacy, the list goes on and
on: community engagement, social justice, civil rights, education equity,
criminal justice reform — he’s had a hand in every bit of it.
Over four hours of Zoom interviews with The Star,
Brooks, sitting at his kitchen table, recounted a litany of stories — humorous
and heartfelt — that document his life and its intersection with some of
Kansas City’s most notable moments. From his 10 years as one of the few
Black officers on Kansas City’s police force during the 1960s to launching
a citywide crime prevention organization to eventually becoming mayor pro
tem, Brooks has led a life of service to his city, and he’s not done yet.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush named Brooks
one of America’s 1,000 Points of Light. In 2016 he received the Harry S.
Truman Public Service Award and in 2019 the Greater Kansas City Chamber
of Commerce named Brooks Kansas Citian of the Year.
Brooks has turned down at least a handful of job
offers in other cities. Nothing, he said, could pull him away. “This is
home,” he said. But it didn’t start here.
“I was born in North Little Rock, Arkansas, May
3, 1932,” Brooks said.
Brooks rattles off dates that way, as if they were
as familiar as reciting his own birthday. “He remembers everything,” said
Estelle Brooks, his oldest daughter. But it also could have been that those
dates were fresh in his mind, given that Brooks recently finished his memoir,
“Binding Us Together,” set for release Tuesday by Kansas City-based Andrews
McMeel Publishing.
“The story of Alvin Brooks reminds us of what true
heroism looks like in everyday life,” Academy Award-winning screenwriter
and University of Kansas film professor Kevin Willmott wrote in an endorsement
of the book. “He fought to make Black lives matter before it became our
national cry.”
The root of the problem
Cluster and Estelle Brooks weren’t his biological
parents, but they were the only ones Brooks knew for about a quarter of
his life. His actual mother was 14 and unmarried when she had him, a scandal
back then. So while pregnant, she left her Florida hometown to stay with
an older sister in Arkansas.
A pregnant teen didn’t sit well there either, Brooks
said. So under pressure from family, she moved across the street to stay
with the Brooks family. After Brooks was born, his mama left him there.
“I didn’t know that the Brookses weren’t my real
parents until 1954,” Brooks said. “I was 22 years old when my biological
mother found me. Nine years later, in 1963, she found my biological father,
and the three of us became very close.” He didn’t know until writing his
book that Estelle and Cluster Brooks had never actually adopted him.
They saved his life though. As a baby, Brooks had
a mysterious ailment and vomited everything he ate. “I was dying of malnutrition,”
he said. A local doctor suggested the baby be fed goat’s milk. The family
bought a goat. The milk worked.
Brooks was less than a year old when they all fled
Arkansas.
Cluster Brooks was known for making “the best moonshine
in Pulaski County, Arkansas.” During an argument over whether that was
indeed true, Cluster, brandishing his Winchester rifle, shot and killed
a white man. The penalty for a Black man killing a white man in 1933 was
certain death.
A conversation with Brooks means listening to a
host of old sayings, mama-saids and story after story. He clearly loved
retelling this one and smiled when he got to the end of it.
The story Brooks heard growing up was that his dad,
awaiting his fate, had his mom go talk with the judge. His dad told her
to chew on a piece of High John the Conquerer root and at the right moment
spew some of the muddy-brown juice on the judge. A sneeze did the trick.
In folklore, the root is named for a Black slave whose spirit was never
broken. It is said to bring luck.
The judge told Cluster either he would die for his
crime or he would leave the state of Arkansas for good. The family sold
nearly everything they had, packed the rest along with Nannee, the white,
pink-nosed Saanen goat, in Cluster’s Model A Ford and fled “under the cover
of darkness,” Brooks said.
“That’s how we got to Kansas City. And I have been
here ever since.”
Education a priority
Brooks said his parents always told him, “Get an
education, son, get an education. And they used to say white folks can
take anything away from you if you’ve got it in your hands, but if you’ve
got it in your head they can’t take it away from you. And you had to be
more educated than the previous generation.”
His family first settled in the Leeds area near
Arrowhead Stadium, “a poor Black area where houses had no running water
inside,” Brooks recalled. When he was 9 or 10, his parents rented a house
“in a poor white area off of Linwood and Brighton.”
The Brooks family was poor too. “We didn’t have
electricity,” Brooks said. They did raise some farm animals, and Brooks
remembers selling eggs and goat’s milk to his white neighbors, “as long
as I took care of the chickens.”
When they first moved in, fights with the neighborhood
boys were a regular occurrence. Later they became close friends. “We got
into trouble together. Well, not bad trouble,” Brooks said. “Good trouble,”
like the times his friends would buy him food at the whites-only lunch
counter and then coax him to sit down with them and eat fast before the
waitress shooed them all out for eating with a Black kid.
They couldn’t go to school together either. His
friends went to the all-white school nearby.
“I had to walk all the way to Dunbar Elementary
School, “where the Black kids went,” Brooks said. He would later attend
R. T. Coles Vocational Junior High School and then Lincoln High School.
“At that time there were 10 high schools in Kansas City, eight for white
kids and two for Black.”
His mother died in 1950, “the year I graduated from
high school,” he recalled. He later attended Lincoln Junior College, “the
Black junior college, which was on the third floor of Lincoln High School.
Because we couldn’t go to the white junior college.”
Brooks was already married by that time. He was
18, and in his senior year, when he wed Carol LaVern Rich. The couple had
six children and were married 63 years before she died in 2013. His son,
Ronall Brooks, a U.S. Air Force veteran, died in 2003 after years of substance
abuse.
Brooks was a family man, his daughters said, but
“Mom was the orchestrator of everybody’s calendar and kept him informed
so he knew just when to step in on something,” said daughter Roslind Wesley
speaking in an online interview along with her four sisters. “Dad had the
weirdest punishments,” but most of the time he would lecture, sometimes
close to an hour. Brooks-Brown preferred a spanking. One time two sisters
were fighting. “Dad made them sit on the steps and hug for an hour,” she
said.
Alvin Brooks2 021921 tll 013F.jpgAlvin Brooks with
his beloved wife, Carol and their family. The pair were married for 63
years before she died in 2013. They had six children, 17 grandchildren,
30 great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren.
A community policeman
But most of the time, they said, their dad was “super
busy.” People would call their house all hours, day and night, asking for
his help with something going on in the city or their lives. “Dad would
get up and go,“said Estelle Brooks, the oldest sister. It didn’t matter
whether it was a local dignitary or the grieving mother of a son accused
of murder.
“Alvin deliberately takes up the pain of others,”
the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield, who died last year, told The Star in 2003.
“He doesn’t have to do that. He has his own pain. But he has surrendered
his life for others, and that is the secret to his strength.”
“It was a part of what I felt I had to do,” Brooks
said. “My wife would say, ‘You don’t belong to us, you belong to the community.
Just make sure the checks are mailed here.’”
His daughters, now all professionals and running
their own businesses, said they learned their work ethic from him.
Out of high school, Brooks had wanted to be a pharmacist,
until one of the three Black pharmacists serving the Black community told
him no white-owned pharmacy in town would ever hire a Black man. He wasn’t
sure the city could support another Black-owned pharmacy.
Brooks went to Lincoln Business College instead.
Before he could graduate, the school was shuttered by the federal government
for some wrongdoings. All the school records Brooks needed to prove he
had the education were confiscated, gone. He had to start over.
He worked three years as a janitor — one of the
only jobs a Black man could get — at Ford Motor Co. Assembly Plant. He
then got hired as one of 16 Black officers on the city’s police force.
When he shared his career choice with his dad, “He
said, ‘Son, why you want to do that? You know how they treat us.’ But my
thought was that I was gonna be a better cop,” Brooks said.
Black officers were only allowed to patrol in Black
neighborhoods until 1958, when a new chief, Bernard C. Brannon, sent a
few to patrol the city’s Northeast Area, where many European immigrants
lived.
One night Brooks was called to Northeast High School
on a report of a body hanging from the flagpole. Turns out, when officers
pulled the figure down, “it was a mannequin splattered with ketchup with
a note pinned on it that said ‘Al Brooks, nigger go home.’”
Brooks said they never found out who did it. But
his fellow officers carried the mannequin back to the station and propped
it up in a chair, where it stayed for days. Brooks found no humor in it
and one night sneaked back to the station and tossed it in a dumpster.
Brooks, a detective in the gang unit, would face
racism many times during his 10 years on the force.
“I took the sergeant’s test and passed it three
times. But I couldn’t get promoted,” he said. But he’s quick to say how
much he’s seen change on the force over the years and was happy to see
Darryl Fort? named the city’s first Black police chief in 2012 and, in
2018, the first Black sheriff of Jackson County.
Brooks took the community policing approach to his
job. “Everybody in town knew my dad and he knew them by name,” Brooks-Brown
said. She remembers as a kid when she and her dad walked into a restaurant
for burgers one evening and everyone in the place stared at them.
“He asked them, ‘What’s going on here?’ and the
lady behind the register pointed to this guy and said, ‘He’s trying to
rob us,’” Brooks-Brown said.
Her dad knew the man and scolded him, as a parent
would a misbehaving child. She said the man handed her dad his gun, and
Brooks walked him outside to the backseat of his car.
“Dad took me home, then took that guy to the station.”
But in 1964 Brooks left the police force for a job
in student services in the Kansas City school district. He had long cultivated
a relationship with the district.
As a cop, he said, “I worked nights so during the
day I’d put on my uniform and go over to the school and just sit and talk
to the kids. People thought I was crazy. But all those kids knew me.”
Brooks was there for them in 1968, when students
erupted in unrest in the city streets after the April 4 assassination of
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I was there on the steps of City Hall,” Brooks
said. “I marched with about a thousand of those kids from 22nd and Vine
all the way to City Hall.”
The night before, Brooks had met with several school
administrators, one of only three Black men in the room. He warned them
that Kansas City, Kansas, schools were planning to close so students could
mourn the death of the civil rights icon. If Kansas City stayed open, he
said, “all hell would break loose.”
No one listened, and the student protest went out
of control when police deployed tear gas. Three days of riots ensued. Five
Black men and a 16-year-old boy were shot and killed — four of them, perhaps
all — by police.
For the city and its people
Brooks left the school district six weeks after
the riots and became director of human relations in Kansas City government,
a first for a Black person. It was a job he never really wanted. But the
city manager wanted him. Others did not.
At the time Brooks was chairman of the local chapter
of the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). “They thought
I was too radical. I’m arrogant. I took the job because they didn’t want
me to have it,” Brooks said. “And friends told me to go take it because
someone has to be a trailblazer over there.”
Brooks and other city movers and shakers met regularly
for meals at Mooney’s Restaurant, now gone, and talked about how to advance
Black Kansas City. “We called it the Black city hall,” Brooks said.
He was encouraged. And in 1972 he was appointed
assistant city manager.
As if the demands of city government weren’t time
consuming enough, Brooks also went and got a master’s degree in sociology
from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His thesis on social organizing
and social change would become the framework for his launching the Ad Hoc
Group Against Crime in 1977. The crisis intervention and prevention group
supports families affected by violence.
Brooks was often among the first people at the scene
of crimes, called by victims, perpetrators or their families, because they
trusted him. Brooks stepped away from Ad Hoc in 2000 when the group merged
with Project Neighborhood and changed its name to Move Up. He returned
to lead the group again in 2008, until he retired in 2015.
Retirement, for Brooks, doesn’t mean sit and relax.
He had been appointed to the Board of Police Commissioners in 2010 and
continued serving until 2017. And he’s currently serving out a four-year
term on the Hickman Mills school board. People still call him when they
get in trouble. But he doesn’t get up and go as often as he used to.
Over the years he has intervened in more homicide
investigations than he can count, “hundreds probably.” One crime though,
more than any other, rattled this old tough detective to the core, the
murder of “Precious Doe.”
Three-year-old Erica Michelle Marie Green’s decapitated
body was discovered on April 28, 2001, in a wooded area near 59th Street
and Kensington Avenue. Her head was found nearby days later. She remained
unidentified until May 5, 2005.
Her mother, Michelle Johnson, and her stepfather,
Harrell Johnson, were charged with her murder. Police said her stepfather
had used a pair of hedge clippers to sever the child’s head after she had
been beaten. He was sentenced to life without parole. Brooks led an effort
to raise money to establish a park in the same area where Erica’s body
was found.
At the time, Brooks was a Kansas City councilman,
a position he held from 1999-2003. He was mayor pro tem while former Mayor
Kay Barnes was in office, 1999-2007. When her term ended, Brooks made a
run for mayor and lost to Mark Funkhouser.
“I was never meant to be mayor,” Brooks said. His
role, he said, has always been “to try and bring people of all races together.
To serve, to be a voice that helps our community our people, all our people.”
Some call Brooks a Kansas City patriarch. A man
of grace, dignity and strength who has literally helped raise and mentor
many of the city’s Black leaders, including 3rd District Councilwoman Melissa
Robinson and former Councilman Jermaine Reed.
“Mr. Brooks has been like a father figure and grandfather
figure to me from when I was really young to adulthood,” Reed said.
Alvin Brooks2 021921 tll 087F.jpgWearing hats they
purchased in Washington, D.C., Jermaine Reed, left, and Alvin Brooks shared
a laugh as they reminisced over their trip to the nation’s capital in 2009
to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama, America’s first Black
president. Reed is a longtime friend and protege of Brooks.
Reed said from the moment he saw Brooks being interviewed
for his role at Ad Hoc, he has clung to his coattails. Brooks remembers
Reed as a boy hanging out at Ad Hoc offices every day.
Reed was there to learn from Brooks. “I wanted to
do what he was doing,” Reed said. “He took me under his wing. He gave me
sage advice, a level of tutelage I would never have gotten had it not been
for him. His level of commitment to justice, fairness, equality and to
change the face of our community is remarkable.”
In 2009, Reed went with Brooks to Washington, D.C.,
for President Barack Obama’s inauguration. “I remember it was freezing.
We had to walk a long way. Mr. Brooks didn’t complain one bit. Many African
Americans thought they would never live to see another African American
in the White House. And to be there that day with someone who has dedicated
his life to civil rights is something I will never forget.”
The two stood among the throngs of people in the
cold listening to Obama speak. “I looked up at Mr. Brooks and tears were
just streaming down his checks.”
Brooks says he still has things to do yet and spends
much of his time speaking to young people, encouraging them to continue
unraveling threads of systemic racism woven into the fabric of the country.
“Yeah, I’ve slowed down,” Brooks said. “But I haven’t
stopped.”
Alvin Brooks’ memoir, “Binding Us Together,” is
set for release Feb. 23.
Author event
Alvin Brooks will discuss his career and life
with Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas in a livestream event that launches
Brooks’ new autobiography, “Binding Us Together: A Civil Rights Activist
Reflects on a Lifetime of Community and Public Service,” 6:30 p.m. Feb.
23. For details and to RSVP, see kclibrary.org or rainydaybooks.com.
Other photo identifications:
During a stop Thursday at the Black
Archives of Mid-America, Alvin Brooks took a call from Carrie Brooks-Brown,
one of his five daughters.
Alvin Brooks as a child with his mother,
Estelle Brooks.
Alvin Brooks with his beloved
wife, Carol and their family. The pair were married for 63 years before
she died in 2013. They had six children, 17 grandchildren, 30 great-grandchildren
and 11 great-great-grandchildren.
Carlos Nelson Sr., president of Cascade
Media Group, recorded a session with Alvin Brooks on his recollection of
the 1951 floods that hit Kansas City for an upcoming documentary.
In 2005, Alvin Brooks, then mayor
pro tem, studied police renderings of Erica Green, known as “Precious Doe”
until she was identified. That day, the prosecutor’s office announced that
her mother was charged with second degree murder in Erica’s death.
In 2009, Alvin Brooks traveled to
Washington, D.C., to witness Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president,
take the oath of office.
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